The video’s a mite NSFW, at least anywhere I’ve ever worked…
[Video][Website]
[6.17]
Anthony Easton: This might be the greatest chorus in the history of choruses, with the phallic signifier of a love gun, and the rhetorical question that ends with running like a hound. That it’s tight, loops in on itself, works as a disco remedy of severe heart break, so that pleases me.
[7]
Iain Mew: I know it’s from the wrong continent, but between the accordion and the theatricality and the “love gun” metaphors I can’t help but feel that this would have been a great fit for Eurovision. In a slightly poor 2012 field, I probably would have voted for it, too, at least if Paulina attacked the chorus as excitingly as on the record. The digital rain behind the first verse seems beamed in from a different, equally great song.
[7]
Alfred Soto: “Shot me with your love gun”! Now there’s a concept: Rubio covering KISS. A novelty more delicious than this rote example of “Latin”-inflected pop.
[3]
Brad Shoup: I’m leaning yes solely because it sounds like an updated Luv’ track. Maybe it’s the castanets, or the endearing directness. The mixing is deceptive; Rubio’s close on the verses, but there’s processing in the shadows. My copy doesn’t have the classic chanting crowd sound: surely this would be standard?
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: The castanets and the half-step rhythm, a memory of a memory of lambada, sound pleasingly like those recurrent Swedish attempts at being “Latin.” Rubio, of course, is the real thing, second only to Shakira as the biggest female pop star in Latin America, jumping from dance-pop to ranchera to country-inflected rock to glam pop as the market and her muse took her. This is presumably her (latest) crossover attempt, and she smartly goes not for overcrowded U.S. dance floors but for glitzy Euro cheese, where the tension between the winking double standard of the lyrics and her ruthless vocal (the video spells out that tension in fetishistic detail) is neither unusual nor unwelcome. Anyway, the second I heard that “ba-ba-barrrrrrrrup-ba-ba” I knew I was lost.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: Accordion Eurodance is an odd crossover move for Paulina, but this is positively delightful. The vocals bounce and trill, and three different metaphors are rolled into one, until you can barely tell where one ends and the next begins. The boys are shooting Paulina with their loveguns and morphing into hounds that she pursues in a Great Hunt. Added bonus: at times, the chorus of ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ sounds more like ‘Boom Boom Boom Boom!!‘ than Rye Rye’s recent interpolation.
[7]